Presented along with XTEA was a variable-width block cipher termed Block TEA, which uses the XTEA round function, but Block TEA applies it cyclically across an entire message for several iterations. Because it operates on the entire message, Block TEA has the property that it does not need a mode of operation. An attack on the full Block TEA was described in (Saarinen, 1998), which also details a weakness in Block TEA's successor, XXTEA.

The recommended value for the "num_rounds" parameter is 32, not 64, as each iteration of the loop does two Feistel-cipher rounds. To additionally improve speed, the loop can be unrolled by pre-computing the values of sum+key[].